The place name Owlpen is said to derive from Saxon words meaning Olla's pen. For Olla was the Saxon chief who first set up his pen, or enclosure, at Owlpen in the ninth century. We still have records of the de Olepenne family, calling themselves after the place, settled here by 1174. They were local landowners, benefactors to abbeys and hospitals, henchmen to their feudal overlords, the Berkeleys of Berkeley castle.

In 1464 the male line failed and the manor and lands passed to the Daunt family on the marriage of Margery de Olepenne. The Daunts were clothiers, later granted estates in Ireland, where by Elizabethan times they had their principal castle in county Cork, while the manor at Owlpen declined. The manor house as it stands was largely built and rebuilt by them, between 1464 and 1616. Since then it has hardly been touched except for small improvements early in the eighteenth century, when the east wing of the manor, and the gardens and Grist Mill, were reordered.

In the nineteenth century, the fortunes of the manor suffered when the Stoughton family inherited and built a new mansion called Owlpen House, at the other end of the estate, a mile away. Today the chief monument to the period is the church which stands just above the manor, heavily Victorianised with elaborate Arts and Crafts mosaics, stained glass and tiles.

The Owlpen estate was sold by lots, for the first time in nearly a thousand years, in 1925. The manor was by then recognized as a Sleeping Beauty, a picturesque ruin much decayed, overrun with ivy and dwarfed by enormous yews, which had not been inhabited for over a hundred years. Its future was only assured when it was acquired and sensitively repaired by Norman Jewson, the distinguished Cotswold Arts and Crafts architect who saved this ancient house from ruin. Since 1974 Nicholas and Karin Mander have carefully repaired the manor and its outbuildings, with the cottages and estate, giving them a new and integrated life for the conditions of today.

A 64-page Guide Book to the Manor and its history is available from the Estate Office.

 

	MORE ON THE HISTORY OF OWLPEN
	THE MANDER FAMILY: AN INTRODUCTION
	THE MANDER FAMILY AS COLLECTORS
	THE OWLPEN ESTATE